Italics get used to express important semantic meaning, so unicode should support them

[Martin J. Dürst]

On 17/12/2020 03:05, Doug Ewell via Unicode wrote:
> abrahamgross wrote:
> 
>>> Children learn to write with upper case and lower case letters in
>>> school, and most people continue to use both as adults. (There are
>>> exceptions of course, some people write only with lower case, and
>>> some only with upper case.)
>>
>> Unicode refused to encode arabic letter variants (not counting
>> compatibility chars), which are taught in school and adults use it,
>> and its how arabic is written, so ur argument here doesn't hold water.
> 
> I'm not sure what to make of that sentence. That's like saying "Unicode refused to encode the capital letter A (not counting U+0041)."
> 
> The compatibility characters are exactly how one is supposed to represent Arabic letter forms outside of their normal context, as described here.

Not necessarily. The 'official' way of representing specific contextual 
Arabic letter forms outside of their usual context is to prefix or 
postfix them with the appropriate JOINER or NON-JOINER characters. So 
there is indeed a non-compatibility encoding for these letter variants 
in Unicode, even if they appear out of context.

What's of course more important is that in their usual context (and 
that's the way they are usually taught and used), these contextual 
variants don't need to be encoded because both humans and computers can 
do the shaping 'automatically'.

Neither something like JOINERS, nor context work as well for the upper 
case / lower case distinction, and that's why it's fair to say that one 
reason for encoding this distinction (in Unicode as well as in many 
predecessor encodings) is that the distinction is learned in school and 
made in handwriting.

Regards,   Martin.